Recovery from Modern Diets: Soy-Ling Bacon…

Health experts often propose turkey bacon as a “healthy option” for those who decline to eat pork for either religious or health reasons. While this might seem an excellent alternative to the average health-conscious consumer, the question to ask is “What does it take to turn a turkey into a pig?” Well, dubious ingredients such as hydrolyzed soy protein, canola oil, hydrolyzed corn or wheat gluten, corn syrup, autolyzed yeast extract, “natural” and artificial flavorings and “liquid smoke.”

An even bigger question is “What does it take to turn a soybean into a pig?” More than you most likely want to know! Pig out intelligently with Smart Bacon® — a product advertised as bringing “that hearty bacon taste into the veggie world” — and you’ll get the following ingredients:

Yum, and just the thing for vegans following Dr. Neal Barnard of the Physicians Committee for (Ir)responsible Medicine, who recommends Smart Bacon® and similar products for those who crave bacon but want to avoid “the embarrassment” associated with consuming such an unhealthy substance.

How does it taste? I spat it out though the Smart Bacon® folks promised, “you’ll swear you’re back in grandma’s country kitchen (even if she lived in Brooklyn).”

For the “delicious hearty flavor of smoked bacon with a crispy bite” and “44 percent less fat!” — try Morningstar Farms Veggie Bacon Strips®. Mavyn McDaniels, a Yahoo Voice reviewer who is eco-conscious, mostly vegan and an avowed fan of Morningstar Farms meat analogue offerings, begged to differ. She started out wanting to like the stuff, and even asked “How bad could the fake stuff be?”

Very bad as it turned out. Given the ingredient list, better her taste-testing this than me!

“The fake bacon is worse than you can possibly imagine. First impressions: when you open the packaging, you’re hit by a pretty assertive synthetic aroma, an almost-but-not-quite right recreation of the meaty, smoky bacon smell. This eerie sort of Bacon Uncanny Valley continued into the visual — this fake bacon just looked like unchewed sticks of gum. It made me anxious — some primordial fear inside me clicked on, because the stuff just does not look like food.

“The instructions on the packaging read, “Fry over LOW to MEDIUM heat, turning occasionally. DO NOT OVER COOK” — and boy do they mean it. I don’t know what that pinkish-red grainy texturey stuff is, but if you’re not careful, it goes from cooked to burnt in an instant. I accidentally burned the hell out of the first batch. To make it even more unappetizing, when cooked, it somehow developed these weird-looking bubbly pimples. When you cook it, it ends up as a dry, thin, crispy cracker.

“How did it taste? I’ll admit: it tastes like bacon. But compared to regular bacon, it’s bad. Really, really bad. Not even close. It’s too square, too artificial, too manufactured. This is supposed to be bacon, where the point is meaty, fatty, salty, smoky flavor.

“Some mad scientists in New Jersey have figured out how to synthesize a facsimile of the smell and flavor of bacon using ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ flavors. It brings to mind the line by Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park: ‘Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.’ So completely disconnected from the true item, and so repulsive, I couldn’t recommend this product to even my worst vegetarian enemy.”
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3 Comments

Process is processed- avoid it. But the Weston A. Price Foundation are quacks telling people waht they want to hear using anicdotal evidence in leiu of science, science which is as clear as global warming to anyone who’s interested.

Not so, Sean. Price Foundation articles and books are extensively, exhaustively documented. What I have found regarding much of the medical/health research is they don’t distinguish or test organic/pasture meat/veggies, so their research does not apply to those of us who have been eating organic and truly natural for years…

For years? For many, many millennia. The nutrition establishment is agrbusiness-owned using grants and contracts. The raw milk “controversy” is a prime example. Not one person has certifiably died from drinking raw milk and only a handful have certifiably become sick. But, since raw milk is so much healthier than their extensively processed, one might say destroyed, versions, the dairy industry wants to kill it. Nutritionists and the government fall in line, as they always do when agribusiness waves checks. I wish you could taste Marlene’s smoked bacon made from Adam’s pigs with only sea salt and a pinch of nitrate, but I’m not going to share.

You take away politics, take away whether you think trickle-down [economics] works, take away even what you think about race. Just look at this community. Are the families healthy and thriving? No? Okay. It's not resilient.

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Small is beautiful, when small is skilled and dedicated. ~Gene Logsdon→

I've observed that people tend to live at one of two extremes in the spectrum of life: those who live on the edge, and those who avoid the edge. Those who live on the edge are hanging out in the most dangerous and unstable places — yet they're also often the most powerful agents of change, because the edge is where change is happening; away from the edge, things are naturally unchanging. ~Thom Hartmann

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. ~Noam Chomsky

Transition Tools (Basic)

Stoics/Freethought

Local Organic Family Farms

THE SMALL ORGANIC FARM greatly discomforts the corporate/ industrial mind because the small organic farm is one of the most relentlessly subversive forces on the planet. Over centuries both the communist and the capitalist systems have tried to destroy small farms because small farmers are a threat to the consolidation of absolute power.

Thomas Jefferson said he didn’t think we could have democracy unless at least 20% of the population was self-supporting on small farms so they were independent enough to be able to tell an oppressive government to stuff it.

It is very difficult to control people who can create products without purchasing inputs from the system, who can market their products directly thus avoiding the involvement of mercenary middlemen, who can butcher animals and preserve foods without reliance on industrial conglomerates, and who can’t be bullied because they can feed their own faces. ~Eliot Coleman